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By spgennard, January 27, 2010 11:55 pm

Microsoft have just updated the “Application Architecture”.  I can’t say I have read it from cover to cover but it is being downloaded to my ebook reader…

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition

The guide helps you to:

• Understand the underlying architecture and design principles and patterns for developing successful solutions on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework.
• Identify appropriate strategies and design patterns that will help you design your solution’s layers, components, and services.
• Identify and address the key engineering decision points for your solution.
• Identify and address the key quality attributes and crosscutting concerns for your solution.
• Create a candidate baseline architecture for your solution.
• Choose the right technologies for your solution.
• Identify patterns & practices solution assets and further guidance that will help you to implement your solution

The guide can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ce40e4e1-9838-4c89-a197-a373b2a60df2&DisplayLang=en

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By spgennard, January 17, 2010 12:50 pm

Since installing the latest firmware update aka version 1.5.   I have experience the odd issue but as I have tried to be analytical about what issues I see.

I have been lucky enough to be reading a couple of books from O’Reilly which deliver their eBooks in multiple formats, as the iRiver supports both ePub and PDF.  I have chosen to install both versions of the same book, so if I experience a issue with one I can flip to the other.

Here is what I have found so far:

• Reading of PDF seems to be the most reliable
• Reading of ePub documents seems to very slow in comparison
• PDF reading can be pain with small text, reflow helps but destroys technical book formats that has embedded code in it
• Battery life is much better

I have had a couple of crashes/hangs of the iRiver but so far it has only been with ePub files.  So guess what… I will be avoiding them like the plague.

Has other people had the similar issues?

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By spgennard, December 30, 2009 10:57 pm

One of the first things I wanted to read on my iriver story was the montly msdn subscription magazine which is available as a .chm. Which unfortunately the iriver story does not support, so I needed to convert it into either .pdf or .epub format.

As I am both a Mac and Windows user my choices were various from using a pdf printer on Windows to using various .chm readers on the Mac.

I first tried to use a .pdf printer on Windows but this not work due me using a 64bit version of Windows 7 and all the free pdf printers failed to either install or just simply did not work… much to my own frustration, so I turned to the Mac as this has native pdf support but did not have native .chm support! Don’t you just love computers…

On my mac I tried out various, these being:

Again, I was meet with disappointment all of them either failed to display the embedded html in the .chm magazine (complaining about a nbsp entity) or just not displaying anything. So decided to raise a bug against the most the one I thought had the most chance of being fixed, which was the iChm application.